Discarding the whole idea that space is in fact curved and overall 3D, look at the Universe as if it were a flat sheet of grid paper. Now, lets say for the sake of argument that each square on the grid represents 1 square lightyear. On the grid you want to travel from point (0,0) to point (5,7). In terms of real space that comes out to 8.6 lightyears to travel. To travel that distance in anything close to a reasonable time (a year or less), you'd have to be traveling at just over 6 times the Speed of Light. And even going that fast it's not an effecient form of travel. So even traveling several times the Speed of Light, even short trips (in galactic terms) take far too long.

To aleviate the boredom that would be brought on in a game by spending hours and hours traveling through empty space, a quicker system of travel needs to be devised to get players across the game world quickly. To that end, LG uses the tride-and-true Jump Gate mechanic. Two portals in space that allow instantaneous travel between them. However, the way gates here work is they're actually openings into an alternate universe that exists roughly parallel to ours. The key difference is the scale of the grid in this "alterverse".

In the example above, in our universe one square represents one square lightyear. However, in the alterverse, one square represents 10 square miles approximately, and the points directly map in each Universe. This means that in practical terms, to travel the example's 8.6 lightyears, a ship would only have to travel 86 miles. For ships with near-light drives, this trip is essentially instant.

The gates are angled such that they provide a straight shot to their partner gate, meaning the ships themselves need no trajectory information, they just enter the gate along the approach vector (and there are systems on the gate to make small nudging corrections) and proceed through the gate at a determined speed.

There are approach and retreat vectors defined on each gate, and a series of magnetic couplers that work together to create "lanes" in space that guide ships in and out of a gate. Prior to any gate entry, Gate Control transmits a request to the receiving gate, the Gate Control station on the other end approves it and adds it to the traffic queue. All queues are synchronized directly through the gate system and through hyperspace transmissions, sent to a centralized command location that monitors the overall condition and health of the Gate System.

In the case of extreme need, gates can be realigned to other gates, though this process is time consuming and can take both gates down for upwards of 24 standard hours while the gates and magnetic guides physically reangle and recalibrate. Several tests with drones are done before traffic is allowed to resume.

Some systems can have multiple gates (Possibility for a great "Hub World")

Gates have the ability to "discover" other gates if left in a sort of scan mode. This is very expensive however since no traffic is going through and thus no money generated. Scanning requires a gate to do a series of minute (less than a tenth of a degree) angle changes. After each change, the gate must be powered up and send an "open" signal. If there is a response, the angle is recorded and either a team is sent through to explore or else the angle is recorded and scanning continues. Due to fears of "unknown" entities being found on the other side of new gates, scanning and exploration has long since been banned, though there are rumors of secret CorSec and GalForce systems with their own gates set in scan mode.

Now, the gates are all well and good for people who want to only travel through known, open and friendly gates (if a system doesn't like you, chances are they won't let you through their gate) so there's need to have some freeform travel allowed. To this end, there are Jump Drives for individual ships. A jump drive allows the player to jump FROM any point in space TO a known and active gate. The pilot first requests a spot in the incoming queue from a gate, then spins up their jump drive, waiting for the "go" signal. With the signal given, the drive is fired, and a gate is opened in space in front of the ship as the main engines catapult the ship forward. The gate closes once the ship is through.

The reason ships can only jump TO gates is because you can not open a gateway FROM the alterverse into our own. You need an open door from our side essentially to get back out. The drive opens the entrance, but as soon as the ship has entered the portal, there's nothing in our universe holding it open, so it closes behind the ship. If there isn't a gate on the other side, the ship rockets through the alterverse and is lost forever. (This alterverse could be called "The Lost Galaxy"???)

There exists the possibility of mobile "gate" ships. Ships that can open up smaller gates anywhere in space, and so long as you know where they are, you could jump to them. These gates would be limited to one ship coming through at a time, and would require a medium to large sized vessel to house the transmitters and power plants needed to open a sustained gate. Such ships though are considered illegal since they aren't part of the regulated and monitored gate system.